eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

April 2015

04/26/2015

Just writing a review of a biography of this Polio stricken President takes an expenditure of energy that he must have burned in a few minutes accomplishing what he did. (Or attempting to accomplish). There is a certain irony to the fact that our most immobile president was probably our most active. “If Roosevelt was pressing an associate to undertake some controversial assignment on Monday,” Jenkins writes,

“it was only too likely that by the Wednesday he would have decided to split the job, or to give it to somebody else instead, and that by the Friday, if things look blue, he would have moved toward abandoning the project altogether, or at any rate for the time being. Yet he was a man of massive achievement, whom, on balance, it is difficult not greatly to admire.”

“He nudged his way forward. If something did not work, he always was willing to try something else.”

Do something. Then think about it. I wonder what it would be to live like that? It is interesting what sorts of mistakes a voting public and history will let you get away with if you come across as caring. (I write at a time when there is some controversy over whether or not Hilary Clinton did something reprehensible in setting up a Foundation to help people in need and taking massive financial donations from foreign countries while serving as Secretary of State and running for the office of President.) Roy Jenkins is clearly an admirer of Roosevelt though he is not ashamed to point out the man’s inconsistencies.

“Roosevelt condemned Hoover’s response to the bonus army [WWI veterans who wanted their promised benefits early] although when he came in, he did not give the veterans their bonus. Indeed, his budgetary stance during the campaign was at least as austere as Hoover's. At Pittsburgh on October 19, he promised to cut the cost of government operations by 25%. On other occasions, however, particularly when Tugwell was doing his speechwriting, he implied planned activity to get the economy moving again. How he imagined he was going to do that while slashing federal expenditure is not remotely clear. But at least his policy models were clothed in sympathy and activism, whereas Hoover's outlook, perhaps more bleakly clear, was adorned by nothing more appealing than hardline negativism. The campaign was a triumph of style over substance, although once in office Roosevelt's actions, while still strong on style, had a good deal of substance about them.”

FDR was able to campaign in 1931 without any real scrutiny. The country would have guillotined Herbert Hoover if he had been king and if they had not the assurance of an election to replace him. Roosevelt campaigned with confidence and a sense of care and little else. Hoover, no doubt, saw what was coming probably better than FDR did. But he had lost the public’s trust.

“Roosevelt’s early months of the White House were a mixture of dynamism and confusion,” Jenkins writes, “... There could be dissimulation in the background, but in the foreground the key note of the new administration was openness and the exuding of confidence.”

Any textbook on the New Deal will explain that there was a first New Deal and a Second New Deal – that the first hundred days of the First New Deal was a bee-hive of experimental legislation. Students of the period will list the various legislative responses to the Depression: The Civilian Conservation Corps, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the infamous National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), etc. There were Acts designed to offer relief; Acts designed to help the economy recover; and Acts designed to reform the system to keep similar crashes from happening again. In the first New Deal, no legislation provoked more of a howl from conservatives than the NIRA. “Some would say that the National Industrial Recovery Act was not just compendious but a ragbag,” says Jenkins,

“Eager youngish men, enjoying the heavy atmosphere of new power in Washington, managed to get their various pet projects inserted into it’s spread of provisions. Two main lines of policy were discernable. First, business was allowed to become more corporate. Competition might be a fine watchword in conditions of prosperity, when it determined who got to the top of the pile fastest; it was less attractive in conditions of adversity, when it dragged everyone down into unprofitable undercutting and shrinking markets. ... This lurch toward corporatism was symbolized by the ‘Blue Eagle’ device for businesses willing to cooperate in a government organized attempt to restore national prosperity. If they accepted the code that involved eschewing price cutting [and] paying the minimum wage of $12 for a 40 hour week ... they were allowed to display the bird on and around their products. . . . Perhaps the longest lasting impact of an NIRA was its support for labors' right to organize and bargain collectively.”

Hooverites saw the NIRA as a massive intrusion of the government into affairs of private business ownership and business owners did not care for the clear disposition in the law to benefit the interests of the worker at the expense of the previously favored owner. This law had clearly kicked a hornet’s nest of conservative opposition. Businesses were already struggling they thought. And here was the federal government adding more obstacles.

“Roosevelt's reaction to these various burst of opposition – invalidation from the Supreme Court, class hostility from the right, populist outflanking from the demagogues – was to launch a second wave of new deal radicalism, in several ways more provocative than the first.”

“Components of the Second New Deal, which was also the prelude to the 1936 campaign for reelection, were broadly of the following: first, the national Labor Act ... ; second, the Social Security Act, which in old age pensions and unemployment benefits, brought to America most of the modest safety nets that Asquith, Lloyd George, and Winston Churchill had introduced to Britain in the pre-1914 Liberal government; third, the Banking Act of 1935, which reorganized the Federal Reserve Board and generally strengthened federal powers of supervision ...; fourth, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, which substantially weakened the power of the great electrical conglomerations, in many ways the 1930s equivalent of the 1900s railroad trusts; fifth, the appropriation of $5 million for the Works Progress Administration, which was life after death for an earlier work release program, the Civil Works Administration, and with Harry Hopkins in charge of the reincarnation, a particularly vigorous one; sixth and most important and most provocative to Roosevelt haters of the lot, the Revenue Act of 1935. This raised surtax rates on high incomes, increased estate and gift taxes, and also subjected corporate profits, whether distributed or undistributed, to higher rates. And it was not done apologetically, with any suggestions that the punishment, necessary only because of economic stringency, hurt the president even more than it hurt the recipients. On the contrary, FDR proposed the legislation by announcing that "great accumulations of wealth cannot be justified on the basis of personal and family security.'”

In a country where everyone votes, it’s tough to beat someone who the masses think is fighting for them. FDR was a Democrat in more than party. No doubt, he saw himself as a corrective to a Republican led elitist trend in government that had been behind the wheel for too long. “The period 1935-36 marked a distinct breakpoint in Roosevelt’s attitudes and strategy,” Jenkins writes,

“During his first two years in the White House, his course was that of consensus, bipartisanship, And trying to placate all major groups and classes. He wanted as many as possible to be within the Rooseveltian tent. After the climacteric, to which about equal contributions were made by the Supreme Court striking down the NRA and by the increasing hostility toward him of the eastern establishment from which he had sprung, he became less inclusive.”

"Never Before in our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” Roosevelt exclaimed of the opposition to his programs.

“They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration, that in it these forces met their master."

But by the end of 1936, the justices had declared New Deal legislation unconstitutional in seven of the nine cases that come before them.

In short, they massacred his legislation. It is no wonder that he came out swinging with his “court packing plan.”

Jenkins notes that John Maynard Keynes was only beginning to be the influence that he would later become in the American economy. It was only in the middle of his presidency that FDR seems to have decided to take up the Keynesian banner and become a champion for deficit spending. Roosevlet’s lieutenant in the adventure was Harry Hopkins, the agent and advocate of deficit finance. "We shall tax and tax and spend and spend and elect and elect" was reputed to be his mantra. In Roosevelt’s second term, and certainly by the time America entered the war in 1941, the plugs on the valves of deficit financed government spending were off, some would argue for good. The general theory suggests that the government should serve the economy in a way similar to the way fat serves the body. In years of plenty, the government should tax itself surpluses that it can spend back into the economy in years of want. If the government needs to borrow to get the economy stimulated, so be it. It can tax the money back when things get rolling.

At this point in time, the biography turns to Roosevelt’s foreign policies and his inexorable influence in getting America into the war against Naziism, something he saw as more threatening than most Americans of his day. Here is how he explained his Lend-Lease policy, a program to “loan” Britain battleships for its war effort.

“Well let me give you an illustration: suppose my neighbor's home catches fire, and I have a link of garden hose 500 feet away. If I can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now, what do I do? I don't say to him before that operation, 'neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you will have to pay me $50 for it.' What is the transaction that goes on? I don't want $15 – I want to my garden hose back after the fire is over. Alright. If it goes through the fire alright, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it. But supposed it gets smashed up – holes in it – during the fire; we don't have to have too much formality about it he says, 'alright, I will replace it.' Now, if I get a nice garden hose back, I am in pretty good shape.”

At every juncture, Roosevelt used his leadership and powers to bring the country in on the side of England.

“On April 9, America acquired the right to establish bases in Greenland, and two days later Roosevelt announced that he was extending the area that the U.S. Navy would patrol to midway between the westernmost bulge of Africa in the easternmost bulge of Brazil. This was an immediate and predictable response to Britain's greatest vulnerability of the time, which was the effective severance of the North Atlantic link by U-Boat action. Lend-Lease was not going to be much good if the material, however paid for, could not arrive except at the price of an acceptable loss is at sea. It also meant that Churchill could comfort himself for such losses as occurred with the thought that they contributed to his desideratum of US entry into the war. And, indeed, such engagements as occurred eight months between then and Pearl Harbor, despite Hitler's general desire not to provoke America, came near to belligerency. If Japan had not existed, it is difficult to decide how long it would've taken for the cautious Roosevelt, despite his bellicosity of 1914-17, to have followed Woodrow Wilson into an Atlantic provoked war.”

From the perspective of a person who appreciates consistency and compassion, Roosevelt is a conundrum. It is difficult to argue that Franklin Roosevelt was a man incapable of caring for the plight of the poor. But consistency? Here he is campaigning in 1932:

I accuse the present Administration of being the greatest spending Administration in peacetime in all American history - one which piled bureau on bureau, commission on commission, and has failed to anticipate the dire needs or reduced earning power of the people. Bureaus and bureaucrats have been retained at the expense of the taxpayer. We are spending altogether too much money for government services which are neither practical nor necessary. In addition to this, we are attempting too many functions and we need a simplification of what the Federal government is giving the people."

Campaign Address on Agriculture and Tariffs at Sioux City, Iowa, September 29, 1932

I regard reduction in Federal spending as one of the most important issues in this campaign. In my opinion it is the most direct and effective contribution that Government can make to business.

Campaign Address on the Federal Budget at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 19, 1932.

The irony should not be difficult to see given America’s National debt upon Roosevelt’s death and what some of his programs are still costing us today.

But he could be “right on” target with his diagnosis. As right on today as he was then.

“In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.”

Franklin Roosevelt's Statement on the National Industrial Recovery Act (16 June 1933)

Question for Comment: What would you think about a Constitutional Amendment that requires the American Government to pay back any money it borrows in any Presidential Administration by the end of that Administration?

A review of a biography of Richard Nixon begs to go into more detail than a reader might care to inflict upon themselves. Chapters of this biography are logically organized. We look at Nixon’s origins in politics, his campaigns for the Presidency, his domestic policy, foreign policy, Vietnam strategy, Watergate involvement, impeachment, and attempt to restore his legacy. Throughout, there is ample discussion of the Nixon political style and how and why he has come to represent much of what we dislike about politics and politicians.

“Richard Milhouse Nixon was an improbable president,” Drew says in her introduction,

“He didn't particularly like people. He lacked charm or humor or joy. Socially awkward and an introvert, he lacked be friends and was virtually incapable of smalltalk.”

It makes you wonder if the question “Who would I rather live with?” is an important one to ask of our potential political candidates. I know I for one would rather have Marco Rubio as a roomate than Richard Nixon for example.

“How did such a peculiar man become president, and win reelection?” Drew asks. She chalks it up to his tenacity and resilience.

“In part it was that resilience, but also his fierce and dogged determination. Nixon displayed extraordinary grit; he was usually willing to do the scut work of politics; he knew the country district by district, doing favors for a myriad of other politicians, expecting their support in return. Moreover, he was an exceptionally smart man, with a solid command of wide-ranging information, and an able politician. He was a product of his times as well as the pioneer of the rough political tactics for which he became famous – and loathed. . . . His political ruthlessness made him a reviled figure but he was in a ruthless profession. Still, his tactics, while not unique or in some cases even original with him, were, for his times, at the outer edges of opportunism and savageness.”

In discussing his childhood, the author notes that Nixon lacked that sense of a home port that many other Presidents have had (For instance, which Presidents hail from the following? Plymouth VT; Hyannis Port, MA; Kennebunkport, ME.; Hope, AR.?) Though Nixon grew up in California, she writes, “he was rootless for the rest of his life, and he moved often. He lacked, in Gary Wills’ term, ‘the stamp of place.’”

One gets the sense from reading about his political machinations, that he really did not know what it meant to be a good neighbor. He did not know how to win without attempting to crush those who opposed him. “To help with his campaign,” Drew notes of his entrance into politics,

“Nixon hired Murray Chotiner, a lawyer and political operative known as a rough tactician. Chotiner's guiding insight was that people voted against, not for; the key to winning was to put your opponent on the defensive – early.”

Nixon’s political life was largely based on organizing resentments rather than inspiring hopes. He seems to have invigorated and nurtured his own resentments and then used them as a beacon to attract others who had similar feelings (Sort of like fireflies who attract mates by sending out unique blinking patterns). Note how this theme reoccurs throughout the biography.

“Nixon appealed to the great number of Americans who resented and feared the cultural and social upheavals of the time. He stood with them against liberals, the East Coast, intellectuals, big government, and racial minorities. He spoke for, he said, the silent majority – the term that would recur later in his political career.”

“The common note among the groups Nixon chose to put together was resentment of government.”

Thus, people who opposed the inefficiencies of the welfare state that Lyndon Johnson had built supported him. Southerners who opposed Federal interference in States rights supported him. Workers who wore hard hats to work and disliked the hippie communes and free-loaders supported him. And anti-intellectuals who saw the country being run by Ivy League college graduates supported him (Nixon's original cabinet broke the postwar record with the fewest number of Ivy Leaguers.)

No doubt, he would not be the first or last politician to build a political base upon resentment but, it is rare that such a movement ends up taking a community of human beings to Shangri-La. Where resentment exists as a predisposition, it always seems to find food to feed itself and is rarely satisfied. In Nixon’s case, his resentments and paranoias were close to the surface apparently. “Nixon had a ferocious temper,” Drew reminds us, “and often engaged in threats and tantrums as well as sudden mood swings. His aids tried to do their best to cover this up.” He was, she writes, always triangulating. Always strategizing. Always covering up something or “going after” someone or condemning something. Even when he was pursuing something as basic as racial justice, there was an element of “winning” and “not losing” to it. Nixon told an aid for example,

"I think if we can keep liberal writers convinced that we are doing what the court requires [about racial equality under the law], and our conservative friends convinced that we are not doing any more than the court requires, I think we can walk this type rope until November, 1972.”

Thus Treating people equally was not so much about the justice of the question itself. It was about political expediency. “In reality,” Drew explains, “Nixon's domestic policy was a blend of the enlightened and the opportunistic. There was in fact no guiding philosophy. In 1969, a Republican Senator referred to Nixon as "the man with the portable center."

It is hard to think of a better turn of phrase for describing a Machiavel than “a man with a portable center.” It is as though power and not the thing you can do with power was the central animating motive of his political life. Perhaps I am simply picking up Elizabeth Drew’s bias here?

Drew notes that with the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King and with the resignation of Lyndon Johnson and the dreadful stalemate in Vietnam, there was something of a “fatigue of liberalism” in the country. People were tired of warring against poverty, ignorance, the Soviet Space program, discrimination, urban blight, etc. They were, perhaps, still wanting to make America a better place but they were weary of fighting long, complex, and losing battles. It makes some sense why the need to improve the environment took hold in the early 1970s. The environment was in clear and obvious distress, just as the poor and the South Vietnamese were. But it did not appear as though the environment would be working against efforts to assist.

“On New Year's Day 1970, with a great flourish, proclaiming himself an environmentalist, Nixon signed a sweeping act passed by Congress, the National Environmental Protection Act, which established a national environmental policy and called for a new office in the executive office of the President to review, propose, and consolidate environmental programs.”

“In the weeks leading up to his 1970 State of the Union address, Nixon called for several polls and found that the public’s concern about the environment had risen from 25% in 1965 to 75% toward the end of 1969. So, in his speech to Congress, Nixon proposed 38 environmental measures.” [Note: Rachel Carson’s book about pesticides, Silent Spring came out in 1962.]

“Still, under Nixon and the Democratic Congress, a number of new environmental laws were enacted: a bill to strengthen the Clean Air act of 1967, setting higher standards for auto emissions. . . . Nixon also signed into law the Clean Water Act, to help salvage polluted rivers, having vetoed the first version of this bill passed by Congress as too expensive and, after being overridden he withheld – impounded – most of the funds Congress authorized for it. He also signed the Coastal Zone Management Act, to protect estuaries; measures to increase US participation in international environmental programs and to expand the number of public parks, placing many of them near cities to appeal to the middle class.”

The Safe Drinking Water Act; and the Endangered Species Act could also be added to that list.

“In all, whatever his motives and his positioning, Nixon presided over a historical expansion of environmental protection in the United States.”

Other domestic ideas Nixon may have had for America were somewhat haphazard. He attempted to give federal moneys back to the States to spend (calling this program “New Federalism”). An office of Consumer Affairs and the establishment of the Consumer Protection Act gave the government the power to protect people from the things they might purchase. Nixon funded Amtrak, still a controversial attempt to subsidize a wiser transportation policy in the face of American resistance to it. Eighteen year olds were granted the right to vote. This was something that only seemed fair since they were being drafted - until Nixon ended the draft. Of particular interest to me I suppose was an increase in spending on the arts.

Ironically, despite his public persona as a man-against-government, government grew in size (as it continues to do).

“As a result of new laws enacted during his time in office,” Drew argues,

“Nixon presided over a dramatic expansion of the regulatory state. The New Deal had established the idea of a larger role for the federal government, to be sure, but the thrust of the New Deal was to restore economic stability and jobs. The environmental, job safety, highway safety, and consumer protection laws that Nixon approved instructed private companies on how to conduct their business. This was a new departure. Nixon probably didn't intend to expand the role and power of the federal government in this way but, cumulatively, it happened with his approval.”

And so, rail is he did against big government, in particular the Great Society, in the end Nixon accepted it's premise: that the federal government can do good things for the people. He was the last Republican president to do so.

I can only recommend the chapter on Watergate as a well-executed summarization of how Nixon took his own administration down into ignominy with his attempt to cover up a botched raid on the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building.

His impeachment included a variety of charges, the most serious of which involved

“his using the IRS in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens; wire-tapping; maintaining a secret investigative force in the White House, partially paid for by campaign contributions; the cover-up; and the misuse of government agencies to interfere with investigations.”

Nixon always felt that he had started his political life with severe disadvantages and he got to the top by overcoming them with determination and ruthlessness. “You find that you can’t stop playing the game” he later commented when asked why he continued in these practices long after he got to the top.

Drew concludes the biography with the following paragraph:

“The events that cause Nixon's downfall commenced as soon as he became president, and came from within his soul. The traits that led to it – the paranoia, the anger, the determination to wreak revenge, the view that the opposition should be destroyed, even the excessive drinking – cannot be excised from the Nixon presidency.”

“They leave the historic question of whether this otherwise smart, talented man, but most peculiar and haunted of presidents, was fit to occupy the most powerful office in the nation – and large room for doubt that he was.”

Question for Comment: Make a list of the people you know who have power. Do you like them? Why or why not?

04/24/2015

One of the great services that this Arthur Schlesinger series of presidential biographies delivers is an analysis of how each president’s early life makes an indelible imprint upon the way that they govern. Charles Peters lays some groundwork on the administration of Lyndon Johnson with these words:

“His mothers conditional love seems to have affected Johnson in two ways. First, he always worried that whatever approval he might receive could be quickly withdrawn. And second, he imitated his mother in his relationships with others, offering generous love until the recipient disappointed him and then administering to that unfortunate soul 'the Johnson freezeout,' the same treatment his mother had given him.”

Throughout the biography, we read about Johnson’s ability to “manage” the political process by first knowing and then leveraging knowledge about the people involved in a decision. “He knew what motivational buttons to push, as well as those to avoid, with each senator,” Peters says. These abilities were both beneficial and detrimental to America as a country, looking back in hindsight. For with that power of coercion, Lyndon Johnson was able to pull the country towards a better more caring and equitable future on the one hand and also into a war in Vietnam that our better judgment would have passed on on the other.

Johnson’s first job was as a teacher in the small town of Cotulla Texas. Most of the people there were Mexicans and most of those Mexicans were poor, treated by the Anglos, Lyndon said, “just worse than you'd treat a dog,” with segregated theaters, restaurants, and schools. Though always a politician, and always aware of what he could and could not care about politically if he wanted to get elected (and he certainly did) this experience would translate into a life-long desire to use political power to give the marginalized in America a chance. Soon after leaving the school, he found himself in Washington, serving as a legislative aid where he was quick to arbitrage his position into hands-on experience.

“Congressional aides had formed it in 1919 as a kind of mock legislature that would give them a chance to master parliamentary procedure and public speaking. It had virtually declined into a social club until Johnson used his Dodge Hotel pals to get himself elected speaker. Under his leadership, weekly attendance grew from a handful to more than 200 as Johnson invited prominent figures such as Huey Long and Fiorello LaGuardia to speak to the group – invitations that also served to expand Johnson Circle of contacts.”

By the time he won an election to the House in his own right, he was already an experienced legislative operator, “connected in a way that the average first-termer could only dream of.” He campaigned hard (stopping by every gas station in his district to buy a gallon of gas and talk) and intentionally flattered and cultivated a network of mentors, disciples, and collaborationist. It would not take him long to turn his connections to the advantage of his constituents, corporations with money to spend on political campaigns, and himself.

Peters notes that one building corporation, Brown & Root, early on become “major beneficiaries of Johnson's programs until the end of his political career, including Vietnam, where the firm was a leading contractor in constructing US bases.” Brown & Root, he says, “would become expert at using ‘change orders’ that permitted the firm to run up cost be on the bids that had won it's contracts, a practice at which it would continue to excel decades later during the Iraq War as Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton.”

Johnson also parlayed his connections into personal gain apparently. Peters also tells us about how Johnson sought to placate [his wife] Ladybird [necessary because of his numerous affairs with secretaries].

“by arranging the purchase of an Austin radio station, ATBC, for her to run. It and its sister television station that the Johnsons created a few years later we're to benefit over the years with one favorable Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruling after another – rulings that made the Johnsons rich. At one time, the television station was permitted to fill up its schedule with whatever programs it wanted to select from the three major networks, a privilege not granted to any other station.”

And as if his abilities and initiative and financial support were not enough, he also learned early how to make use of the quirks in the electoral system.

“Johnson's forces showed that they had learned the lessons of their defeat in 1941. They held back final official returns from the counties where they controlled the election machinery. As these counties began to report the official returns, an astonishing number of new votes for Johnson were discovered by the county election officials.”

And how to make use of government “pork.”

“Johnson, always mindful of his political base, helped to make sure that the manned spacecraft center was located in Houston.”

It almost seems the height of irony that a man this capable of providing us with such a caricature of what we have come to dislike in politicians could use all this power for the lasting benefit of the country. I am almost tempted to compare him to those kings in the Middle Ages who balanced out their nefarious deeds in getting power and money by purchasing masses and monasteries for the mother Church – like some modern Al Gore compensating for his huge house with the purchase of carbon credits.

In 1964 Johnson laid the foundations of what he would christen “The Great Society” in a speech at the University of Michigan. “It's first two building blocks came in the form of bills he steered through Congress that year,” we read, “The Economic Opportunity Act, which created the war on poverty, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Johnson’s War on Poverty soon included the Headstart program, designed to help parents break the cycle of poverty. Following hot on its tail, was the Job Corps, modeled on Franklin Roosevelt Civilian Conservation Corps. To this was added the Community Action programs that funded initiatives that helped poverty stricken people organize and collectively solve their economic challenges. Johnson next made federal aid to education his next first priority, overcoming the resistance of those who saw education as a clear line across which, the federal government had no constitutional authority to go (and now look at us.)

Soon, his administration moved on to improve the lives of the elderly, sick, disenfranchised, and desperate in ways that Franklin Roosevelt had not managed to address in his New Deal legislation. Medicare, Medicaid, The Voting Rights Act, The Immigration Act, opening the doors of health care, medicine, suffrage, and citizenship to those who had been excluded for decades.

America was essentially molting, transforming from a larval stage where every person took care of themselves and their own families to a country where everyone was responsible for everyone (“It-takes-a-village-ville” I call it.) Johnson was the mid-wife that helped birth a good deal of it, essentially flattering, bribing, threatening, cajoling, scolding, shaming, manipulating, and outright defying many in his own region (The South) and party (the Democrats). And in the midst of all this do-gooding, he retained a reputation for his ever increasing aggressiveness in the use of power. “Johnson had never been an easy man to work for,” Peters tells the reader,

“The stress of Vietnam, like the stress of 1960 campaign, made him even more abusive and demanding. He described his ideal staff as someone ‘who will kiss my ass in Macy's window and stand up and say “Boy, wasn't that sweet.’”

It goes without saying that a good deal of Johnson’s presidential biography is filled with discussions of Vietnam. Vietnam is what killed Johnson’s chances of a second term in office and a place in the foyer of the Presidential Hall of Fame. Vietnam was, in many ways, his downfall. And Peters points out that it was so as a consequence of his Texas heritage and the dishonesty of the Kennedy brothers. Here is Peters in his own words:

“The Kennedys kept secret the single most dovish act in the American negotiations to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Bobby [Kennedy] promised the Soviet ambassador that the United States would withdraw its missiles from Turkey, a commitment that in fact [Secretary of Defense] McNamara carried out a few months later. John Kennedy not only concealed the truth about his dovishness from the American people but peddled misinformation to his friends Charles Bartlett and Stewart Alsop, which they published in the Saturday evening Post in November 1962, saying that the president had been disturbed by Adlai Stevenson's weakness in suggesting exactly what Kennedy had secretly done – namely, offering to remove our missiles from Turkey if Russia removed it's missiles from Cuba.”

“. . . Johnson later concluded that he had to make sure he seemed as hawkish as he thought the Kennedys were.”

“. . . So it was fear of criticism from Kennedy or Goldwater or both that made it imperative to Johnson that he appear tough. To demonstrate his resolve, he ordered an immediate retaliatory attack against Vietnam [after alleged American naval ships were ‘attacked in the Tonkin Gulf] and asked Congress to adopt what came to be called the Token Gulf Resolution, which authorized the president to take all necessary measures to repel and counter attacks on the Armed Forces of United States and to defend the freedom of South Vietnam.”

In other words, the Kennedy’s had managed to talk the Soviet Union into removing missiles from Cuba (on our borders) by promising to later remove nuclear missiles from Turkey (on the Soviet Union’s borders). They let the world, Vice President Johnson included, believe that they had simply scared the missiles out of Cuba by being resolute. This impression was something that they felt they had to do to deflect any criticism that they were a couple of softy appeasers (like their dad had been at Munich).

But the consequence was that after John F. Kennedy died and Robert Kennedy became a competitor for the “throne,” Johnson could not afford to look “weak.” He did not think he had the luxury of doing what he did not know the Kennedys had done – that is, blink and back down.

“If he had abandoned South Vietnam, he said, 'there would be Robert Kennedy out front, leading the fight against me, telling everyone that I had betrayed John Kennedy's commitment to South Vietnam. That I had let democracy fall into the hands of the communists. That I was a coward, an unmanly man, a man without a spine. Oh, I could see it coming alright. Every night when I fell asleep, I could see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long open space. In the distance I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting at me and running toward me: 'Coward! Traitor! Weakling!'"

“Johnson had grown up in a Texas dominated by the legend of the Alamo. David Crockett and Jim Bowie fought to the last Man rather than surrender.”

“Johnson's failure comes down to the simple fact that he could not bear to lose the war. He was wrong. Still what he did was understandable for a man reared on the legend of the Alamo, who had heard Winston Churchill tell Adolf Hitler, we shall never surrender. Add to these apparent lessons of history Johnson's obsessive fear of being seen as a coward and his misunderstanding of the Kennedys – partly their fault, partly his – and one had all the ingredients necessary to produce tragedy."

“Justification [Johnson] would most often cite [for his Vietnam escalation] was the domino theory. Underlying this theory was the fear of another Munich, the capitulation to Nazi aggression that set the stage for World War II.”

If you have ever read excerpts from the Pentagon Papers and wondered why the American government continued to fight a war that it knew it could not win, … there it is for you: history (the Alamo and Munich) and a lack of accurate understanding of history (The Cuban Missile Crisis nuke compromise).

I have intentionally left out of my review all the stuff Charles Peters includes about Johnson’s various and sundry marital infidelities. After reading more about who he was as a political operator, I suppose it only makes sense that he operated in other layers of his life as well.

Question for Comment: If a politician “gets good things done” do you care how they get them done? Or how they treat their subordinates, wives (or husbands)? Do you care if they lie if in the end, they “get good things done”?

"An alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new Prairie States among farmers and their wives." - E.V. Smalley, 1893

According to Lillian Schlissel’s research on women on the frontiers (Women’s Diaries on the Western Frontier), life on the Great Plains could be hard on anyone’s psyche. Women were often isolated in ways that they had never been isolated in the East or in the European homelands from which many of them came. The Homestead Act, passed during the Civil War to make sure that no matter who won, the West would be filled up with Free-Soilers, offered 160 acres of free land to young families who thought they could handle living on a piece of prarie land for the five requisite years that it took to obtain actual title.

Take a shot at trying to figure out just what 160 acres looks like HERE. A football field is about an acre so I tell my students to try and imagine 160 football fields assembled together. It’s approximately the size of a modern professional stadium with all its attendant parking lots. What this means is that if you moved out onto the prairie, you did not have a high chance of finding yourself in a functional close community, at least for a number of years or decades. Not a community that involved daily interactions with kith and kin. If you came from some foreign country and spoke no English, or if you happened to move near difficult people, you could socially disadvantage yourself even more. Add to this the ton of work you had to do to survive, brutal long winters that sometimes sealed you into your soddie like a tomb, broiling hot summers, and constant wind – now subtract phones, television, radio, electricity, and deprive yourself of contact by settling a several week trip from civilization and you can understand why some people acquired “prairie madness.” If you tried to pull this off with a partner that you had nothing to talk about with, started having children made miserable by the cold and often hunger and sickness, and you might find yourself going stir crazy too.

The novel, now movie, The Homesman, is about the mental health catastrophe that resulted in the lives of not a few settlers who could not bear up under the strain of it. One has to wonder … had women been allowed to vote in 1862, would they have constructed a system like the Homestead Act that literally placed so many women in situations so diametrically opposed to their social needs? I wonder what a “Homestead Act” designed by women would have looked like?

The primary protagonist in the film is a woman by the name of Mary Bee Cuddy. "I live uncommonly alone," she says in the movie's most subtle understatement. Capable as a Kansas summer day is long, she and God and a few farm animals manage her farm sans husband or partner. The film opens with a window into the pathos of her situation. She finds herself, age 31, a veritable spinster, trying to arrange a marriage with one of her neighbors, a man, no self-respecting woman of her ability with actual choices would ever consider I suspect. But what’s a human to do? You are living on a 160 acre piece of land. If you have a single man living in a similar lot adjacent to you, that man is basically the pool of fish you have to fish in. If he is a bore, a sot, a bottom feeder, or if his IQ score dips down below the thermometer on Kansas February midnight, you have no way to “shop around.”

You moved to Kansas, sweetheart. You are not in a position to “play the field” as they say.

Your heart goes out to this poor woman, her biological clock obviously ringing like a fire bell, as this dolt turns poor Mary Bee down for being “too plain and bossy.” Her stoic reaction to his rejection informs you that this is a woman capable of tremendous repression. Perhaps the wise viewer will see the danger in it.

The scene is full of pathos and humor but it is interspersed by the director with cameos of other women in the region who’s lots are even worse. You are meant to understand by the time the scenes are done (and they are difficult to watch, too difficult for some I imagine who would enjoy the movie otherwise) why people went insane, tried to murder their abusive husbands, sometimes did murder their children, and began to cling to dolls and comatose states to survive.

Without spoiling the plot, I will just say that this is a movie that can be difficult to watch. It lures you in with humorous exchanges and then drops the anvil on your head for thinking that characters you come to love will manage, in the end, to summon up enough internal humor to cope with their deprivations. It’s a story that reminds you that we all have our plimsol lines. (A plimsol line is a line on the outside of an ocean going cargo ship that tells you just how much cargo it can take in its hold before it risks becoming unseaworthy and swamping.) No matter how strong your resolve, your purpose, your faith, your altruism, your stoic determination, loneliness eventually has a way of wolfishly hunting you down if you don’t find a way to defend yourself from it.

Question for Comment: How do you know when you have subjected yourself to too much or too little isolation?

04/23/2015

Reading presidential biographies reminds you how important a person’s personality and personal history is to the way they exercise leadership. Herbert Hoover came from a significantly deprived childhood in many ways and yet rose to great wealth within a few years of graduating from Stanford University. You might say that he was the Mark Zuckerberg of the mining industry. “At 27, he was reputed to be the highest salaried man of his years in the world.”

It is little wonder that when he obtained the Presidency, he insisted that the solution to problems of poverty resided within individuals and associations of individuals in poverty, not in some Government program or handout. He had not “made it” to where he made it with the help of Pell Grants, WIC, the CCC, Federal block grants, Social Security, and Headstart. He did not become rich and successful because some president declared a “war on poverty.” The logic of his personal history would have made it impossible for him to be an FDR who knew from childhood that his wealth had been achieved with someone else’s aid.

Soon after acquiring his fortune by traveling all over the world and re-invigorating or discovering lucrative gold and silver mines (among other things), he found himself in London in the early days of WWI. Hundreds of Americans were stranded in England or on the continent and he endeavored to help them and then to help the poor people of Belgium suffering the ravages of a war fought on their farmland. “Brazen though he was,” Leuchtenburg states of his organizational style, Hoover, displayed” superb managerial skill” and, “deserved all of plaudits he was to receive.”

“As chairman of the committee for relief in Belgium, Hoover took on daunting mission. He needed to raise one million dollars a week; buy tens of thousands of tons of food from all corners of the globe; see that specially marked ships took the precious cargo through perilous seas to Holland, then through canals into Belgium, and make sure that it reached the people for whom it was intended and nobody else.”

Hoover was a terribly difficult person to work for apparently but terribly effective. He was never a paragon of “soft skills” when it came to working with people. There was little that was “touchy feely” about his style. But, “no one questions that he was prodigiously effective.” Lord Eustace Percy in the British foreign office called Hoover, “the bluntest man in Europe,” but acknowledged that he was able, “without apparent effort, to handle a situation involving more irreconcilable elements than any other situation in this war.”

“By the end of 1916, George Nash has written, Hoover 'stood preeminent in the greatest humanitarian undertaking the world had ever seen.' He had raised and spent millions of dollars, with trifling overhead and not a penny lost to fraud. At its peak, his organization was feeding nine million Belgians and French a day.”

His biographer suggests that Hoover’s experience running the food aid programs in Europe and in America during the war years only served to solidify his pre-existing traits. Taking dictatorial powers in an emergency came natural to him and bore results. Assembling volunteer responses to tragic catastrophes was his forte. Leuchtenburg insists that Hoover seemed incapable of learning a lesson if it contradicted his preconceived beliefs. He was not “flexible” in that way.

“To Hoover, the experience offered the first of a series of proofs he took to heart: volunteerism and private charity could answer any crisis; it was not necessary to involve the state. He gave little notice to the reality that he had been able to act with such authority because his committee had been granted semi-official status. Nor did he heed that the sizable sum of $150,000 he distributed had come from the US government.”

“Hoover drew from this experience the same lesson he believed he had learned in aiding the Americans stranded in London in 1914 – that one should rely not on government but on civic minded individuals 'imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice in full measure.' He had been able to recruit a staff of 350 volunteers, including more than two dozen Rhodes scholars domiciled in England and 'gentlemen of wide commercial experience willing to devote their entire time, at their own expense.' In the course of the war, his aversion to the state rigidified. Semaphoring the attitude he would take during the Great Depression, Hoover called the [State] plan to aid Belgians rendered jobless by the German invasion 'socially wrongly founded.'”

“His celebration of voluntarism badly distorted the historical record. Even at the start, Hoover had bluntly told Ambassador Page that private contributions, no matter how great, would be of such uncertain quantity that it was absolutely necessary for the allied governments to bankroll the venture liberally. Early in November 1914, he had notified Allied ambassadors that government subvention was essential, and less than three weeks later, he had instructed Lord Percy that, ‘since philanthropy could not be counted on, we must obtain a regular governmental subsidy.’ ‘The CRB,’ Hoover pointed out in 1916, ‘is almost wholly supported by government funds. I feel that if the whole engine were placed simply on the governmental basis it would actually be safer than in the hands of a volunteer body.’” Nearly four out of every five dollars Hoover spent came out of government treasuries.”

My Democratic friends will tell me that I should pay close attention to what I just wrote, no doubt. It may well be that some leaders are designed for some tasks and that it can be a handicap to be so well designed for one type of task that it does not occur to said leader to change their approach for another. What worked in responding to food crisis in Belgium may not have been an ideal solution to responding to America’s Great Depression. “Insistence on total dominance,” Woodrow Wilson’s key adviser Edward House believed, “was Hoovers besetting fault.”

From his business and war experiences, Hoover seems to have cemented into his psyche a set of principles that later experience could not get him to compromise. Whereas FDR was willing to trade in principles and convictions for outcomes regularly, Hoover was not. “Hoover proffered clashing explanations for his success,” we are told in this biography,

“On one occasion, he told a congressional committee that democracy had triumphed because of its 'willingness to yield to dictatorship.' Customarily, however, he put forth an altogether different account, which is the one that accompanied him the rest of his days. The public spirited American people, he claimed, had responded wholeheartedly to the request that they conserve food, demonstrating that 'there was no power in autocracy equal to the voluntary effort the free people.' This insistence on the superiority of the private realm to intervention by the state once again flew in the face of facts. Though Hoover hailed the spirit sacrifice among consumers, improvisations like “breadless Wednesdays” had only a marginal impact. For many months, consumption of wheat in America actually increased as working-class citizens largely ignored the food administration’s propaganda.”

It should be clear that Hoover was not an Ayn Randish radical individualist. He understood the importance of responding to problems with collective will and effort. He did not ask downtrodden Belgians to “feed themselves.” But he did not believe in government as a first response. He believed in voluntary organizations forming to solve a problem and then dissolving back into the formless void of the democratic state to be reformed when another problem arose. “While I am not a believer in extending the bureaucratic functions of the government,” he said,

“I am a strong believer in the government intervening to induce active cooperation in the community itself. We are passing from a period of extreme individualistic action into a period of associational activities, he announced in 1924.”

And yet, despite his reliance upon the association, he still held to the vital importance of individuals in directing those associations. “Acts and ideas that lead to progress are born out of the womb of the individual mind,” he insisted, “not out of the mind of the crowd.

“The crowd only feels: it has no mind of its own which can plan. The crowd is credulous, it destroys, it consumes, it hates and it dreams – but it never builds.”

One wonders if Adolf Hitler was plagiarizing when he wrote in Main Kampf,

“Does anyone believe that the progress of this world springs from the mind of majorities and not from the brains of individuals? . . . For there is one thing which we must never forget: in this, too, the majority can never replace the man. It is not only a representative of stupidity, but of cowardice as well. And no more than a hundred empty heads make one wise man will an heroic decision arise from a hundred cowards.”

Perhaps it was Hoover’s great deficiency when measured against Franklin Roosevelt that though Hoover came from poverty, he had always tasted success as a consequence of effort, like eating usually makes you full. Having been stricken with Polio, though born to privilege, FDR knew that life doesn’t always reward the individual’s effort fairly. Life was a crap shoot you needed to be insured against by communal caring. He was open to a system that would offer help without shame. And Franklin Roosevelt knew how to convey that he cared, even if he did not always know how to do so wisely. “The country greatly admired Hoover,” Leuchtenburg writes, “but did not warm to him as it had to Teddy, or did later to FDR, Ike, and Reagan.” “Hoover’s feeling for the downtrodden,” one of Hoover’s public relations men argued, “translates itself not into tears but into action. . . . while others weep, he works." As Leuchenburg puts it, “Hoover appeared to be congenitally incapable of demonstrating that he was caring – or willfully indifferent to the need to do so.” But clearly, he did care. He just did not know how to wear that care with what might be regarded empathy.

When people were in crisis, Hoover coolly and calculatedly went into problem solving mode. Perhaps what was needed was a somewhat more motherly moment of shared empathy? Suffice it to say, when the Great Depression hit, Hoover had a philosophical response that appeared to the suffering like a formula when they needed a family.

“Hoover's policies toward distress – in the drought stricken counties and across the nation – reflected an aversion to the omnipotent state and ‘a belief in local government responsibilities.’ Even more important was the tradition of private giving. Grants from Washington, he contended, would impair the character of recipients and would deny benefactors the opportunity to sacrifice.”

“My sober and considered judgment,” he said, “is that federal aid would be a disservice to the unemployed.” [Wonder how that line would go over in a contemporary political campaign?]

Hoover would later call Roosevelt “a chameleon on plaid” for the way that he could shuck and jive through the crisis. What people knew did not change with FDR though, was not “what he believed” but “whether he cared.” This order was reversed for Herbert Hoover. He fought against FDR’s floundering response to the crisis.

“At the end of 1933 Hoover told an archconservative Republican Senator, 'When the American people realize some ten years hence that it was on November 8, 1932 that they surrendered the freedom of mind and spirit for which their ancestors had fought and agonized for over 300 years, they will, I hope, recollect that I at least tried to save them.'"

There is a certain irony to the fact that by 1932, this man who the country was convinced did not care, had by all intents and purposes, over the course of his life, “fed more people and saved more lives than any other man in history.”

Question for Comment: What do you prefer in your leaders if you have to pick, someone who is demonstratively caring? Or someone who is demonstratively capable of solving the actual problem?

“Throughout history, some men have gained power by the sword, others by the purse. Still others – the ones with whom Wilson identified – gained power by the compelling nature of their words.”

“Woodrow Wilson was a man of words,” Brands says. It would be difficult to find two presidents who were more different in fundamental nature than Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Indeed, Wilson wound up apologizing to some foreign countries for what Theodore Roosevelt had done to them with his “big stick” ways. Certainly both presidents had significant influence in American history but, I tend to think that Roosevelt had influence because he made up his own mind so firmly while Wilson had influence because of his ability to make arguments that eventually (not immediately) made up the minds of others.

One wonders if it is essential for a President (or any leader) to be able to speak and write well, for who really accomplishes anything with a mere four to eight years of power if they cannot inspire people to act on an argument long after they have lost the power to compel compliance with it?

“What is the object of oratory?” Woodrow Wilson asked in an editorial he wrote his sophomore year at Princeton in 1877.

“Its object is persuasion and conviction – the control of other minds by a strange personal influence and power. What are the fields of labor open to us in our future life career as orators? The bar, the pulpit, the stump, the Senate chamber, the lecturer’s platform.”

Thus, even in college, Wilson and a friend had vowed to obtain enough status in life to allow them to evince change in the world through the use of rhetorical powers they intended to acquire.

“...we would acquire knowledge that we might have power; and that we would drill ourselves in all the arts of persuasion, but especially in oratory . . . that we might have facility in leading others into our ways of thinking and enlisting them in our purposes.”

Where Teddy Roosevelt loved to take up arms and charge up hills to change the world as a young man, Woodrow Wilson longed to “inspire a great movement of opinion.” What the two shared was a growing conviction that the presidency was a pair of boots that could be and should be stretched to the size of the man occupying the office’s feet.

Wilson argued in Constitutional Government that, that

“The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can. ...The office will be as big and as influential as the man who occupies it . . . the personal force of the president is constitutional to any extent to which he chooses to exercise it....”

This is what Teddy Roosevelt called the “bully pulpit” and what Woodrow Wilson aspired to exercise when he began to see how Teddy Roosevelt had begun to use it. Wilson lamented that he had only been introduced to the power of the radio after the great cause that he would have used it to achieved was lost (ratification of the Versailles Treaty).

In the article, “Woodrow Wilson, the Rhetorical Presidency, and Congress,” Don Wolfsenberger writes the following about Wilson’s conscientious nurturing of persuasive rhetoric as a force of political power,

“Ray Stannard Baker concludes that [Wilson’s campaign speeches] were ‘extraordinarily calm, steady–tending to the academic and expository.’ They were not lacking in fire and did not ignore the evils of the day, ‘but the orator seems, above everything else, to reach his effect by the cool processes of reason,’ and is ‘never denunciatory, never dismal.’”

Woodrow Wilson had assumed that his presidency would be consumed with domestic issues and thus would require an almost exclusive use of rhetorical powers. Two years after he became president, WWI erupted in Europe, ships began to be sunk, and affairs of an international and military nature impeded upon his office. “Almost nothing in his background had prepared him to be commander-in-chief,” Brand says of this transition.

“He had never served in the military, opting out of the one war of his adulthood, the Spanish-American War (which had made Theodore Roosevelt famous). His study of politics had largely excluded war. His sensibilities were closer to passivism than belligerence; odes to peace flowed naturally from his tongue and pen, while the praise of war would always be a struggle.”

In the words of Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of “On Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs”(From the book, On Combat) Woodrow Wilson was far more “sheep” than “sheepdog.”

“If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath--a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed.”

Wilson avoided entering the war as long as he could. And he was the first of all the belligerents to want to see it end. He began constructing arguments to end it (14 of them) even as he was constructing an army to help those arguments along (I suspect that Teddy Roosevelt would have been doing the same in reverse order). No doubt Wilson understood where his strengths were and preferred to engage in combat where he had advantages (behind the lectern rather than a machine gun).

Perhaps it is in the nature of humans that we do not all change for similar reasons. Some of us do not change until we are convinced of the need to. Others do not change until coerced. When all was said and done, Wilson had no actual power to send American troops into the Senate and lacking that, he failed to persuade Henry Cabot Lodge and his constituent Senators that the United States would be well served by membership in a League of Nations. Wilson suffered a stroke trying to convince the American people otherwise.

And yet his arguments were not as easily erased as they were defeated, and in time, they began to make sense.

Teddy Roosevelt was less inclined to delay the energetic use of military powers at his disposal. His was an activist approach to executive power. The year before Woodrow Wilson took office, Roosevelt was indirectly comparing their two styles. “There are plenty of other things I started because the time had come,” he said in 1911,

“But the Panama Canal wouldn't have been started if I hadn't taken hold of it. Because, gentlemen, if I had followed the general or conservative method, I should have submitted an admirable state paper, occupying a couple of hundred pages detailing the facts to Congress and asked Congress consideration of it, in which there would have been a number of excellent speeches made on the subject in congress and the debate would be proceeding at this moment with great spirit, and the beginning of the canal would be fifty years in the future. . . .

Fortunately the crisis came when I could begin the work unhampered. I took the Isthmus, started the canal, and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me and in portions of the public press the debate still goes on as to whether or not I acted properly in getting the canal, but while the debate goes on the canal does too and they are welcome to debate me as long as they wish, provided that we can go on with the canal now.”

Question for Comment: Most of you have worked for different kinds of bosses. Which do you prefer? Those who use their power to take action – get things done? Or those who wait and communicate until there is a consensus among all concerned for getting that thing done and in that way?

04/22/2015

“IN THIS country there is not the slightest danger of an over-development of warlike spirit, and there never has been any such danger. In all our history there has never been a time when preparedness for war was any menace to peace. On the contrary, again and again we have owed peace to the fact that we were prepared for war; and in the only contest which we have had with a European power since the Revolution, the War of 1812, the struggle and all its attendant disasters were due solely to the fact that we were not prepared to face, and were not ready instantly to resent, an attack upon our honor and interest.” - Theodore Roosevelt, Address to the Naval War College, 1897.

Theodore Roosevelt’s father married a Southern belle from Georgia who had numerous close kin fighting for the Confederates. Thus, when the Civil War broke out, Teddy Roosevelt’s father opted for a non-combat position to placate his rebel wife. Young Theodore thus had a splinter planted in his ego that he never quite managed to pull out. Throughout his life, he seemed to always be aiming to get back into a fight and show the world that Roosevelts were not pansies. No doubt, his views of women and marriage were profoundly impacted as well.

“I believe that men and women should stand on an equality of right, but I do not believe that equality of right means equality of function; and I am more and more convinced that the great field, the indispensable field, for the usefulness of woman, is the mother of the family. It is her work in the household, in the home, her work in bearing and rearing her children, which is more important than any man’s work, and it is that work which should be normally the woman’s work, just as normally the man’s work should be that of the breadwinner, the supporter of the home, and if necessary, the soldier who will fight for the home.”

By the time Roosevelt wrote his epic history of America’s Imperial conquest of the West (The Winning of the West), his penchant for lionizing military valor was pronounced.

“Two or three hundred years later the Germans, no longer on the defensive, themselves went forth from their marshy forests conquering and to conquer. For century after century they swarmed out of the dark woodland east of the Rhine, and north of the Danube; and as their force spent itself, the movement was taken up by their brethren who dwelt along the coasts of the Baltic and the North Atlantic. From the Volga to the Pillars of Hercules, from Sicily to Britain, every land in turn bowed to the warlike prowess of the stalwart sons of Odin. Rome and Novgorod, the imperial city of Italy as well as the squalid capital of Muscovy, acknowledged the sway of kings of Teutonic or Scandinavian blood.”

One suspects that the main reason that TR was ready to take a battalion into the trenches against Germany in 1917 was not that he criticized the Germans for being aggressive but that he was insulted at how little respect they had for American martial spirit. The Germans had thrown down the gauntlet by invading poor little Belgium without fear of any manly reprisal from a country like America.

I have been reading a number of Presidential biographies lately and this batch of them all seem to have this strain of machismo in them; Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon particularly. They seem inclined to want to prove that they are men with American soldiers. Maybe it has always been thus? Maybe this is why such men are so ambitious for power in the first place.

“Theodore Roosevelt was “a deeply moral man,” Auchincloss writes,

“He was first and foremost taken up in a lifelong and enthusiastic fight against lawbreakers; he was a policeman at heart, which was obviously why he had done so well as a Commissioner in New York. And above all, he detested bullies: The foulmouthed gunman he had seen terrifying customers in western bars, the back room machine politicians who milked the urban poor, the Pennsylvania mining tycoons who exploited their ignorant immigrant laborers. Like a Byronic hero he wanted not so much to raise the poor as to lower the proud.”

If one looks at his legislative and executive accomplishments, it becomes apparent that he enjoyed battling against strong powers for the benefit of weaker ones. “To sum up the major legislative accomplishments of Roosevelt and his two terms of office,” Auchincloss says,

“we might list them as follows: the Elkins law, against the railroad’s practice of giving rebates to favorite customers; the creation of the Department of Commerce and Labor with its Bureau of Corporations, which grew to regulate every business that crossed state lines; The Hepburn Bill, which amended and vitalized the Interstate Commerce Act and gave government the power to set railroad rates; the Pure Food and Meat Inspection laws, which remedied some of the scandals of the meatpacking industry as exposed by Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle; and the Employers Liability and Safety Appliance laws, which limited the hours of employees.

“There always had to be an element of wrongdoing in anything TR sought to crush,” the author continues, “a touch of crusade in any such proceeding.”

“To him there were good trusts and bad trusts. Bad trusts sought to profit by restricting production by trickery or device, by plotting against competitors, by oppressing wage earners, or by extorting high prices for a commodity made artificially scarce. If the trusts were not disciplined and regulated, then the real radicals would take over. As he put it: ‘We seek to defy law-defying wealth, in the first place to prevent it's doing evil, and in the next place to avoid the vindictive and dreadful radicalism which if left uncontrolled it is certain in the end to arouse.’"

One supposes that this is what inspired him to go off hunting after he left the Presidency. What could be more fun than killing predators?

“The expedition traversed Kenya and ended in Khartoum. It was estimated that TR and his son shot some 300 animals, and that TR was personally responsible for nine lions, eight elephants, twenty zebras, seven giraffes, and six buffaloes.”

I wonder who the zebras were bullying?

It is this disposition to enjoy the use of power against the powerful that no doubt led to his falling out with successor, William Taft. Taft, it appears, had all the power that Teddy Roosevelt no longer had and used it, to Theodore’s point of view, too sparingly.

“There was certainly no question at any rate that TR had to come to view Taft as the betrayer of all his progressive ideals, his so-called Square Deal, this despite the fact that the Taft administration had achieved an eight hour day for government employees, expanded the civil service, supported a constitutional amendment in favor of the income tax and brought more antitrust suits under attorney general George W. Wickersham, including the one that broke up the Standard Oil Company, than in all of TR's two terms. Yet a considerable part of the public agreed with the former president. Taft was widely seen as less zealous than his predecessor in his opposition to business monopoly, and his support of the protective tariffs in the interest of Wall Street strongly intensified this feeling.”

To Theodore Roosevelt, this seemed a reasonable enough excuse to end Taft’s presidency at one term and to let TR “Lock n’ Load” for another term. “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord,” he insisted at his nomination. By doing so, he split the Republican Party and handed the presidency to Woodrow Wilson, a cerebral and scholarly man who Roosevelt loved to despise. Four years later, TR hoped that he would be drafted to run again, announcing prior to the Republican convention of 1916,

"It would be a mistake to nominate me unless the country has in it's mood something of the heroic – unless it feels not only devotion to ideals but the purpose measurably to realize those ideals in action."

Theodore Roosevelt passed his dedication to the manly application of martial valor to each of his sons. They all served in WWI and all were deemed worthy of their sire’s aspirations of them.

“The death of Quentin [TR's son] shortly before the end of the war,” Auchincloss concludes in his final chapter,

“was a devastating blow to the Roosevelts. TR has been described as sitting desolate on the porch at Sagamore [the family home], murmuring over and over, 'poor Quinikins! Poor Quinickens!' But he could still write proudly to an old rough-rider friend, Robert Ferguson, ‘it is bitter that the young should die, but there are things worse than death; for nothing under heaven would I have had my sons act otherwise then as they have acted. They have done pretty well, haven't they? Quentin killed, dying as a war hawk should ... over the enemies lines. Archie crippled, and given the French war cross for gallantry. Ted gassed once and cited for conspicuous gallantry. Kermit with the British military cross, and now under Pershing.’”

I feel guilty just sitting here writing about this man. I should be out fighting something.

Question for Comment: The recent movie American Sniper seems to suggest that this quality of Theodore Roosevelt’s is rare but necessary in real men; that there needs to be something … combative … something martial … primitive … and protective about them to qualify as men. What do you think of that notion?

04/05/2015

“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.” J. R. R. TOLKIEN, The Two Towers

Millions of men and women sacrificed years of their lives and their lives themselves to overcome the tremendous challenges of WWII. It seemed to me only reasonable to give up a mere fifteen hours of my life to immerse myself in their experiences and reflections on their experiences before I tried to convey to my high school students this coming week what WWII was like for those who went through it. So, over the past three weeks, I have tried to take about five hours each weekend to make my way through Ken Burns’ documentary, The War.

It seems to me impossible that someone could watch it and not be moved, though I would not put it past some of my students to try. They are certainly not quite ready for a fifteen hour marathon of it so I need to select those portions than do the most to capture the essence of a larger experience. Perhaps I will have my students read the chapter on WWII and select which aspects of the war they would most be interested in hearing about from those who went through it. I wonder if anyone has assembled an index of all the subjects covered in it?

The following comes from a portion of the notes that I use in dealing with “Hitler’s” mistakes. After watching Ken Burns’ The War, I would add that he vastly underestimated the resolve of democratic peoples to appreciate and defend their freedoms.

Could Hitler have won? Yes and No. Had he set out to accomplish less, he could have won and won more than he set out to accomplish. There is no way that he ever could have accomplished what he set out to accomplish because he made it quite clear that he intended on subjugating Europe, the domination of World Trade, and the elimination of World Jewry. Essentially, Hitler just wanted the farm next to his and his neighbors either working for him or dead. This is not a strategy for victory. His Germany was destroyed as a result of his personal character flaws and in leadership, character does matter. Most historians would suggest that he two greatest mistakes made by Hitler were the attack on Russia and the declaration of War on the United States. Here were some of his other mistakes.

1. He was committed to an ideology that demanded superiority or extinction. He would accept no middle ground of peaceful coexistence and thus he forced everyone who was not German into the camp of the enemy and lent life or death intensity to all resistance.

2. He passionately loved Germany in the abstract but didn't give a rat's behind for Germans. When it was obvious that Germany could not win, he instructed Speer to destroy Germany. To make it a wasteland. "Only the inferior will remain after this struggle. The good have already been killed." He told Speer. At the core, Hitler cared nothing for any individual but himself. He was in love with Germans only in so far as they were tools to his own aggrandizement.

3. He was a lousy historian. Lewin states it poignantly in the following paragraph: "The mistake made by Hitler, who took such pride in the study of History, was that he failed to learn anything from the lessons of the past: Failed that is to identify features common to earlier empires which-apart from the brute force he understood-had contributed to their distinctive vitality. Whatever the loss of blood on the way, whatever the rapine and loss of human rights on the way, successfully dominant empires have brought in their train a number of offerings which have palliated if not improved the lot of the conquered. . . . Even the conquistadors of Islam or Spain brought with them a faith which gave their conquered peoples hope. Hitler could offer no more than thralldom or extinction."

Nietche was his religion and he was his own God. For Hitler to think that he would build anything on a foundation of genocide was delusional. He inspired nothing but hatred wherever he went and where he didn't there was only a matter of time before he did. Plans for a new train system Hitler was to have built included train cars designed for Easterners to be transported 480 to a carriage, barely better than the cattle cars taking people to death camps . . . and he expected these people to submit to this while Germans rode in spacious comfort up front. Perhaps he believed himself strong enough to extinguish the human spirit?

4. Another flaw was his insistence that his thousand year Reich had to be achieved in his lifetime. He had no patience. No willingness to wait. Again, his plans were based on what he wanted his own life to be like, not what Germany could be. His dreams were hopeless because they included no plan for a multigenerational effort. There was no system for the transfer of power from one generation to the next. Any mediocre student of history can tell you that this is a central problem that must be resolved for any empirial ambition to have a hope of success. Despite his aspiration, Hitler’s empire, even if militarily successful would have destroyed itself in the cauldron of disunity that his death would have provoked. He had, for every grant of power, granted another counter grant to someone else to balance it. The army, the Airforce, the SS were all suspicious of each other.

5. Hitler's next greatest mistake (speaking just in strategic terms to say nothing of moral terms) was his treatment of Jews and particularly the Jews of the ineligensia. By this insane policy, he sent to death thousands of Germans who would have fought in the German army as they had during the First World War. With the exile of so many prominent names in science, literature, art, psychology etc. etc., Hitler made Germany a cultural wasteland that had little to fight for by the time of its demise. One of Hitler’s great mistakes was his failure to see the importance of science in the coming war. "If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of German science, then we shall have to do without science for a few years," He is reported to have said about the effect of his anti-Semitism in the universities. Five of the Scientists who left were Nobel Prize winners. Six would later become so. Hitler exiled giants and with certain notable exceptions, left himself with pigmies. Addressing the foreign press in Nov 1938 Hitler spoke about intellectuals. "Unfortunately one needs them. Otherwise one might - I don't know- wipe them out. But unfortunately, one needs them." This was not a man who would attract top quality scientists like America was doing at the time.

6. Next on the list would be the way that Hitler mangled the Justice system and bent it into a tool of repression. Historically speaking, there is no way of building a viable nation or empire that disregards basic principles of justice. In time, a state will disintegrate in internecine feuds and vendettas. Hitler chatted about making Poland into a British Raj but he had never examined in any detail the ways in which the British courts worked in India to operate a plural society. By dispensing with long held traditions of justice, he introduced a cancerous tumor into the body politic of Germany that would have brought it down with as much efficiency as the allied armies.

7. Because of his racial policies and the need to define German women as child-bearers, he relegated about 5,000,000 women to under employment who might have otherwise been used in the War effort. Churchill's daughter Mary in contrast was an anti-aircraft gunner.

8. An inability to listen or to adapt. The "swift unexpected blow and then see what happens" was Hitler's trademark. It only works so many times. He completely failed to understand how victories won by such cunning inspired distrust henceforth. It did not occur to him how such tactics were used to unify and inspire his enemies. He also failed to understand how his impulsivity was demoralizing to his army. They would spend a year developing plans which he would trash on an account of his intuition. They eventually stopped planning and stopped trusting that he really knew what he was doing.

9. He wanted to accomplish so much but couldn't make his way to his goals one thing at a time. There were never enough resources to accomplish everything he had to have. Particularly in the Russia campaign, he didn't content himself with Moscow. He had to have Moscow and Stalingrad and the Baku oil fields. Conquest was like a coke addiction with him. He could never cut back. Never retreat. Never take a loss. Never delegate decisions to generals on the field. Here was what some of his commanders began to think of him:

"They were fighting a war that they did not want under a commander in chief who did not trust them and whom they themselves did not fully trust, by methods contrary to their experience and accepted views, with troops and police that were not completely under their control." General Yodl on the German Generals

"Ammunition shot off. Arms and equipment destroyed. In accordance with orders received the German Afrika Corps has fought itself into the condition where it can fight no more." - last message from the Afrika Korps before surrendering to allied forces.

It almost seems to me that his inability to consider himself a whole person without controlling everything outside himself made it impossible for him to think objectively about surrendering control over anything. Ronald Lewin says this of him:

"He was the Reich and the Reich was Hitler: Any extension of the Reich territory was an extension of himself. Any surrender of ground for those trivial reason of tactics or strategy which the military theorists propounded was therefore unacceptable and indeed unimaginable, for it entailed a surrender of a part of Adolph Hitler."

10. The Allies were able to read all his mail. By cracking the German secret codes. The British and Americans were able to know all of the intimate details of his plans. If Rommell orders fuel to be sent to point A by means of Ship B which was to dock at port C, the British had a welcoming party for it when it arrived. If Hitler planned an assault for objective F on day G, the Americans were prepared to ambush it.

I guess, of all these, the thing that I find most pronounced is his banal vapid understanding of history. I don't think he knew how to learn from history. He just knew how to use it. Hitler, the proclaimed student of history lost army after army with his "Stand Fast" syndrome. In Tunisia. In Italy, Russia and Normandy. He refused to allow any of them to retreat to more defensible lines. Armies who were not advancing were condemned as slovenly and lazy no matter what odds they may have been defending against.

To conclude, Hitler's empire began in a state that most empires collapse in. It was built around Hitler and had no lasting structure without him. He had a weasel’s cunning for seeing to it that no rival to his power was ever able to arise and thus no successor. His treatment of his own military, particularly after the assassination attempt robbed them of initiative. His treatment of intellectuals and Jews robbed him of the best scientists in the world. Germany lost because they were led by a loser.

Question for Comment: Why were Hitler's ideas so much more difficult to argue with before the war than after? Must ideas be militarily defeated to be dismantled?